CARNIVAL STORY (original) (raw)
CARNIVAL STORY
SAILORS ASHORE!
By Terry Joseph
Episode 16
The final article in Terry Joseph's
�'The Carnival Story' series.
Express
March 7, 2000
Page 15
February 23, Carnival Tuesday of 1955, saw truly spectacular mas presentations.� Bands like Sign of the Pagan, Royal Dancers of Siam, Richard II and _The Festival of Bacchus_painted the streets; but all stood in awe when a sailor band, USS Skipjacks, hit town.
A consortium of four steelbands from the East Dry River area, Tokyo, Crusaders, Fascinators and City Symphony had teamed up to produce USS Skipjacks, the collaboration boasting upwards of 4,000 members, at a time when 300 masqueraders would have been considered a 'big' band.
Such was the spread of the band that most of the enlisted men of the USS _Skipjacks_probably never heard any of the music for which they had paid a fee.
Groups formed their own rhythms, but the underlying tempo was provided by the chipping of leather shoes against the asphalt roadway, as the band snaked along Piccadilly Street, then west into Duke Street, before turning north on Charlotte Street to head for the Savannah competition.
From my vantage position in the upstairs gallery of the Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds Lodge Hall, just west of the corner of Charlotte and Duke streets (above Roosevelt Barber Saloon) the band looked like a sea of white, the 4,000 bobbing sailor caps forming a moving froth.
Today, a similar steelband group effort at the same type of mas barely musters one tenth of that number.
And part of the beauty of USS Skipjacks was that its presentation came at a time when sailors "rocked the boat" by forming lines across the width of the band, each putting his arms around the shoulders of men on either side.
Starting at the front of the band, each succeeding line chipped in a sideways movement, alternating direction, to give the overall view of men on the deck of a destroyer that was being tossed around by particularly choppy waters.
The coming together of those four steelbands also scored a mark for the continuing attempt at peaceful celebrations.
Curiously enough, it was a bunch of sailors from USS Skipjacks who inadvertently created one of that day's greatest scares, when one member attempted to cheat his cohorts and make off with a pail of ice cream that had been stolen as a group effort.
As he scampered across Duke Street, members of the Silver Stars band, going south on Frederick Street, misconstrued the action and though it to be the actions of a group bent on violence.
Fearful of the reputation of bands from "behind the bridge", the softer Silver Stars members scattered.
George Ng Wai, who played pan that year for the Newtown band, remembers fellow pannists hiding even in the Woodford Square fountain, oblivious to the danger of drowning.
For it was also a time when steelbands, driven by a sense of competition of which they had not yet deduced proper outlets, took to violence for the slightest of cause.
In addition, the popular movies of the day were largely those that featured violent gang wars.� In much the same way as the bands had taken their names from the movies (Destination Tokyo, The Gay Desperadoes, et al), pannists and their followers were taking their behavioural cues from the cheap entertainment of the big screen.
Movies like Slaughter on Tenth Avenue and Rumble on the Docks were big favourites and the scenes portrayed in them were soon to be played out on the streets, with devastating consequences.